Quite possibly you have made a good catch for what could be the next trick that creationists try. I find it hard to be more specific than that because this thing will have to play out for a couple of years to see if this is really them up to no good yet again.

That being said, the bill text does have my bullshit alarm going off on two specific points. Before I get to that, however, let me preface by saying that I assume that the creationists will be back at some point. The Kitzmiller case only sent them into a corner to lick their wounds for a bit until they can find a new angle to work. This could well be one of those angles.

My thinking on this is that they have perhaps accepted to some degree that they cannot just do stuff and then get the court system to give them a pass. So they are now going to try to get laws passed that will grant them some broad authority.

Now remember that the traditional role of the courts is only to interpret the will of the legislature and the people. Some recent news stories not withstanding, only rarely do they like to overturn a law in whole or find that a law really meant something that it never really said in the first place. So a carefully worded law could possibly limit the ability of the courts to stop the next attempt to get creation back in the schools.

So the Scopes trial was 85 years ago and the legislature in just now realizing that they need a law to make it legal to teach science? The very concept is almost worthy to snort soda out of my nose. That is probably not the real basis of the new bill. Rather, I can find in it a possible reading that would allow the teaching of creationism, provided that it is dressed up as science.

Let me now turn to my first point.

From the bill text:

What are the notable recent examples of this? Seriously, has anyone in Iowa been in trouble for teaching accepted scientific fact for what it is? Or is there a fear on the part of creationists that if they try to push their crap without enabling legislation they they are just going to get their pee-pee slapped by the courts again?

Potentially more silly text games here. As a fellow science freak, I could have a fairly narrow reading of that and say that they just want to teach science in the regular accepted way. However, laws should be read not as scientific reasoning but as legal reasoning.

So what might the phrase “the full range of scientific views” mean to a lawyer who wants to slip something past us without us realizing? Sure, as science progresses, the range of acceptable views becomes at once narrower and deeper. But remember that creationists want to define some wacky alternative stuff as science. The “full range of scientific views” could easily be read as just open ended enough to be the point where they can make inroads into the classroom.

Pardon me? What discrimination is apparent here? They are students and by any reasonable definition, they are not expected to know the material of a class before they actually take that class. If they go into the class holding a view that is at variance with the material which they are there to learn, then tough for them. At the end of the class, they need to be able to show that they have learned the material. Whether they agree with it on a personal level or not has no relevance.

Put simply, if a Christian take a class in geometry, he can believe all that he wants to that pi=3.00 as is clearly stated in 1 Kings 7:23. However, if he puts that on his final, then he should get marked down for the stunt. He should not be entitled to legal protection and an automatic passing grade because he holds a bad idea.

Now onto my second point. Specifically, the bill contains a definition of science as

And just why is that even in the bill? Sure, peer review is one of the foundations of science but why does it need to be explicitly defined? Again, this should not be read as a scientist might but rather as a lawyer might. Done that way, just what door is being opened that perhaps should not be?

Peer review is all well and good but who are the peers and where are the reviews being published?

Remember here that the creationists have a small core of academic power on their side, including a core of people with legitimate Ph.D.s in various fields (Michael Behe in biochemistry, William Dembski in mathematics, Russell Humphreys in Physics just to name a few).

Then there is the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) that has been handing out accredited masters degrees in science for over 20 years. If that is not enough, there are outright academic frauds like “Barry Setterfield Scientist”, an Aussie who has as his sole claim to being a scientist that he took one semester of freshman geology before becoming a creationist.

All of those nutjobs put together could easily claim peer review provided that they can manage to occasionally disagree with each other.

I would like my analysis to be wrong. In fact, I hope that it is. However, only time will tell and if it is right, we would not be wrong to start honing the academic axes right now so that we have a shrp blade when certain events come to pass.

Guillermo Gonzalez (astronomer)

^^^You mean like that^^^?

I have you trumped. Irreducible Complexity, the foundation of Intelligent Design, has been peer reviewed scientifically. That's why we know it's bullshit. It was a hypothesis that didn't pan out in experimentation.

They just can't win for losing.  Makes me wonder why they continue to try.  Oh, yeah.  That thing called "faith", turn a blind eye toward facts and believe in fantasy.